An Employment Data Strategy for India

Following the recommendations of the Task Force set up by the Government of India in 2017 to revamp the employment data architecture, India’s employment statistics have undergone an overhaul. Two significant changes have been the replacement of NSSO’s quinquennial Employment and Unemployment Surveys with the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and the introduction of monthly payroll data. Given the dualistic nature of India’s labor markets and the dominance of low-wage and low-productivity informal jobs, this exercise will serve a limited purpose. Against this backdrop, we examine the inadequacies of the existing data architecture, identify the gaps in data collection, and make recommendations for generating more relevant and comprehensive labor market data. We argue that it is imperative to continue with NSSO’s quinquennial household survey and supplement it with the annual PLFS. The collection of data in household surveys needs to be based on all three different employment approaches, usual status, current weekly status, and current daily status. None of these can be dispensed with. We propose constructing measures of labor underutilization and informal employment to help us understand the nature and enormity of the employment challenge. We argue that there is a need to rethink the existing classification of employment status categories and to ask more probing questions about the nature of employment and activities undertaken by workers. We also highlight the importance of establishing a Business Register, as enterprise surveys face the problem of an incomplete frame.Instead of simply conducting new surveys, we believe it would be more prudent to strengthen the existing data machinery and ensure that state governments are equal partners in this exercise.